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Poe's Poetry. — Mr. Edgar A. Poe is one of the most remarkable, in many respects, among our men of letters. With singular endowments of imagination, he is at the same time largely possessed of many of the many qualities that go to make an admirable critic; — he is methodical, lucid, forcible, — well-read, thoughtful, and capable, at all times, of rising from the mere consideration of the individual subject, to the principles, in literature and art, by which it should be governed. Add to these qualities, as a critic, that he is not a person to be overborne and silenced by a reputation; — that mere names do not control his judgement; — that he is bold, independent, and stubbornly analytical, in the formation of his opinions. He has his defects also; — he is sometimes the victim of capricious moods; — his temper is variable — his nervous organization being such, evidently, as to subject his judgments, sometimes, to influences which may be traced to the weather and the winds. He takes his colour from the cloud; and his sympathies are not unfrequently chilled, and rendered ungenial, by the pressure of the atmospherc [[atmosphere]] — the cold and vapors of a climate affecting his moral nature, through his physical, in greater degree than is usual among literary men, — who, by the way, are generally far more susceptible to these influences, than is the case with the multitude. Such are the causes which occasionally operate to impair the value and the consistency of his judgments as a Critic. As a Poet, Mr. Poe's imagination becomes remarkably conspicuous, and to surrender himself freely to his own moods, would be to make all his writings in verse, efforts of pure imagination only. He seems to dislike the merely practical, and to shrink from the concrete. His fancy takes the ascendant in his Poetry, and wings his thoughts to such superior elevations, as to render it too intensely spiritual for the ordinary reader. With a genius thus endowed and constituted, it was a blunder with Mr. Poe to accept the appointment, which called him to deliver himself in poetry before the Boston Lyceum. Highly imaginative men can scarcely succeed in such exhibitions. The sort of poetry called for on such occasions, is the very reverse of the spiritual, the fanciful or the metaphysical. To win the ears of a mixed audience, nothing more is required than moral or patriotic common places in rhyming heroics. The verses of Pope are just the things for such occasions. You must not pitch your flight higher than the penny-whistle elevation of —
“Know then this truth, enough for man to know,
Virtue alone is happiness below.”
Either this or declamatory verse, — something patriotic, or something satirical, or something comical. At all events, you must not be mystical. You must not ask the audience to study. Your song must be such as they can read running, and comprehend while munching pea-nuts. Mr. Poe is not the writer for this sort of thing. He is too original, too fanciful, too speculative, too anything in verse, for the comprehension of any but ‘audience fit though few.’ In obeying this call to Boston, Mr. Poe committed another mistake. He had been mercilessly exercising himself as a critic at the expense of some of their favorite writers. The swans of New-England, under his delineation, had been described as mere geese, and those too of none of the whitest. He had been exposing the short comings and the plagiarisms of Mr. Longfellow, who is supposed, along the banks of the Penobscot, to be about the comliest [[comeliest]] bird that ever dipped its bill in Pieria. Poe had dealt with the favorites of Boston unsparingly, and they hankered after their revenges. In an evil hour then, did he consent to commit himself, in verse to their tender mercies. It is positively amusing to see how eagerly all the little wittlings of the press, in the old purlieus of the Puritan, flourish the critical tomahawk about the head of their critic. In their eagerness for retribution, one of the papers before us actually congratulates itself and readers on the (asserted) failure of the poet. The good editor himself was not present, but he hammers away not the less lustily at the victim, because his objections are to be made at second hand. Mr. Poe committed another error in consenting to address an audience in verse, who, for three mortal hours, had been compelled to sit and hear Mr. Caleb Cushing in prose. The [column 3:] attempt to speak after this, in poetry, and fanciful poetry, too, was sheer madness. The most patient audience in the world, must have been utterly exhausted by the previous inflictions. But it is denied that Mr. Poe failed at all. He had been summoned to recite poetry. It is asserted that he did so. The ‘Boston Courier,’ one of the most thoughtful journals of that city, gives us a very favorable opinion of the performance which has been so harshly treated. “The Poem,” says that journal, called “The Messenger Star,” was an eloquent and classic production, based on the right principles, containing the essence of true poetry, mingled with a gorgeous imagination, exquisite painting, every charm of metre, and a graceful delivery. It strongly reminded us of Mr. Horne's “Orion,” and resembled it in the majesty of its design, the nobleness of its incidents, and its freedom from the trammels of productions usual on these occasions. The delicious word-painting of some of its scenes brought vividly to our recollection, Keats’ “Eve of St. Agnes,” and parts of “Paradise Lost.”
That it was not appreciated by the audience, was very evident, by their uneasiness and continual exist in numbers at a time. Common courtesy, we should think, would have suggested to them the politeness of hearing it through, though it should have proved “Heathen Greek,” to them; after, too, the author had expressed his doubts of his ability, in preparing a poem for a Boston audience.
That it was malapropos to the occasion, we take the liberty to deny. What is the use of repeating the “mumbling farce” of having invited a poet to deliver a poem? We (too often) find a person get up and repeat a hundred or two indifferent couplets of words, with jingling rhymes and stale witticisms, with scarcely a line of poetry in the whole, and which will admit of no superlative to describe it. If we are to have a poem, why not have the “true thing,” that will be recognized as such, — for poems being written for people that can appreciate them, it would be as well to cater for their tastes as for individuals who cannot distinguish between the true and the false.”
The good sense of this extract should do much towards enforcing the opinion which it conveys; and it confirms our own, previously entertained and expressed, in regard to the affair in question. Mr. Poe's error was not, perhaps, in making verses, nor making them after a fashion of his own; but in delivering them before an audience of mixed elements, and just after a discourse of three mortal hours by a prosing orator. That any of his hearers should have survived the twofold infliction, is one of those instances of good fortune which should bring every person present to his knees in profound acknowledgment to a protecting providence.
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Notes:
In his Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (1986), Ian Walker prints this text as it was reprinted in Poe's Broadway Journal, without clearly indicating this choice. In so doing, he follows Poe in omitting one small paragraph and several other minor differences. Consequently, for the first time, the present text is based on what appears to be the unique original, in the collection of the Charleston Library Society in Charleston, SC. The Poe Society is grateful to the Charleston Library Society for making a copy available, and to Scott Peeples, of the College of Charleston, for obtaining photographs for us.
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[S:0 - SP, 1845] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe's Poetry (W. G. Simms, 1845)